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John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Rockefeller Jr. spent much of the Standard Oil fortune on heritage: from 1926 he funded the restoration and reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, he paid in the 1920s for urgent repairs to the palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau and Reims Cathedral, and he built The Cloisters in New York for medieval art. Williamsburg's early focus on the white colonial elite, sidelining the enslaved majority, has since been revised by its curators.
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Paul Mellon
Born
Andrew Mellon's son Paul gave away much of his inheritance to the arts. He built the Yale Center for British Art, free to visit, around his gift of British paintings, completed the National Gallery's East Building in Washington with his sister Ailsa, and founded the Paul Mellon Centre in London to fund research on British art. He also gave hundreds of works to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
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John Paul Getty Jr.
Born
The son of J. Paul Getty settled in Britain and gave away an estimated 140 million pounds or more, much of it to heritage: 50 million to the National Gallery in 1985, funds to keep paintings in British collections, a large gift to the British Library and support for cathedrals and churches. His Wormsley estate library, and the Lord's Cricket Ground stand he paid for, were personal passions, but most of the money went to public institutions.
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Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild
Born
The financier Jacob Rothschild restored Spencer House in London, a Palladian palace he leased and opened for public tours, and oversaw the Waddesdon Manor estate, which his family had given to the National Trust, building up its collections and gardens. He also chaired the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the first Heritage Lottery Fund, which shaped how public money supported British heritage from the 1990s. He died in 2024.
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Aga Khan IV
Born
As spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims and owner of a large business network, the Aga Khan founded the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in 1988. Its projects restored the gardens of Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, turned a rubbish dump in Cairo into Al-Azhar Park while repairing the historic walls and neighbourhood beside it, and rebuilt historic quarters in Kabul and Zanzibar, often training local craftsmen. He died in February 2025.
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Stanley Ho
Born
The Macau casino magnate bought bronze animal heads looted from Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860, including the horse head for about 8.9 million dollars in 2007, and returned or donated them to China, where the horse head was eventually installed back at the palace site in 2020. Critics argue paying high prices fuels the trade in looted art; supporters see repatriation. Both views belong in the story.
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Soichiro Fukutake
Fukutake, who ran the education company Benesse, turned the depopulating island of Naoshima in Japan's Seto Inland Sea into an art destination from the late 1980s, commissioning museums by Tadao Ando and, in the Art House Project, restoring old village houses and shrines with artists, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto's rebuilt Go'o Shrine, pictured. Visitors now support island businesses, and the Setouchi Triennale extends the idea to other islands, though locals have mixed views on the crowds.
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Ronald Lauder
Born
Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, founded the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation to restore Jewish life and buildings in central and eastern Europe after communism, and was a founding force behind the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, set up in 2009 to raise a perpetual fund for conserving the camp's remains. He also founded the Neue Galerie in New York for Austrian and German art. His political lobbying is a separate and more contested record.
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David Rubenstein
Rubenstein, co-founder of the private equity firm Carlyle, calls it patriotic philanthropy: he paid half the cost of repairing the earthquake-damaged Washington Monument, bought a 1297 copy of Magna Carta and lent it to the National Archives, and funded work at the Lincoln Memorial, Monticello and Montpelier. Critics note the publicity such gifts bring a private equity billionaire, but the repairs are done and the sites are open.
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Andrew Lloyd Webber
Born
The composer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera set up the Open Churches Trust in 2017 to keep historic churches open to visitors, and his foundation funds performing arts education. He has also restored and bought London theatres, which he owns commercially through LW Theatres, so his heritage work mixes charity with business. He sold some paintings from his collection to fund the foundation.
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Henry Ford
Born
Ford, who once called history bunk, spent heavily in the 1920s and 1930s preserving it his way: he moved dozens of historic buildings, including the Wright brothers' cycle shop and Edison's Menlo Park laboratory, to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, and built a museum of American industry beside it. It is a public institution today, but taking buildings from their original sites and his own antisemitism complicate the legacy.
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